this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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Why Facebook does not use Git – and why most other devs do • DEVCLASS (devclass.com)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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  • Facebook does not use Git due to scale issues with their large monorepo, instead opting for Mercurial.
  • Mercurial may be a better option for large monorepos, but Git has made improvements to support them better.
  • Despite some drawbacks, Git usage remains dominant with 93.87% share, due to familiarity, additional tools, and industry trends.
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[–] x1gma 12 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Serious question, why do they use SVN, as in what does SVN better than Git for the department using it?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

The manager likes it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

While I'm not using it, since we started our small-team hobby project in git and moving away from it would be a bother, there is one use-case of SVN that would save us a lot of headaches.

SVN being centralized means you can lock files. Merging Unity scenes together is really pain, the tooling mostly doesn't work properly and you have no way how to quickly check that nothing was lost. Usually, with several people working on a scene, it resulted in us having to decide whose work we will scratch and he will do it again, because merging it wouldn't work properly and you end up in a situation where two people each did hundreds or thousands of changes to a scene, you know that the Unity mergetool is wonky at best, and checking that all of those changes merged properly would take longer and be more error prone than simply copying one persons work over the other.

We resorted to simply asking in chat if anyone has any uncommited work, but with SVN (or any other centralized VSC, I suppose) we wouldn't have to bother with that - you simply lock the scene file and be safe.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Git LFS does actually support file locking. But in general I find LFS to be hackily pasted onto Git and not very good (as with submodules).

[–] x1gma 2 points 4 months ago

Right, completely forgot that locking exists in SVN, and I guess it definitely makes sense if you're collaboratively editing unmergeable files.

Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Because we always used it!

[–] Treczoks 1 points 4 months ago

SVN has the big advantage of serialized revision numbers. Which is essential for out build- and release-system.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

SVN admin here:

  • easy to partial checkouts, no need to clone entire repo
  • euuuh...
  • much simpler for non developers that need version control e.g. engineers